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Comment by spacechild1 | Hacker News Reader

That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".

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Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise

I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine

Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?

Honestly? Yes. This is why its such a problem that most of the training data was not used with permission, and without the correct copyright status or license associated with it

There's a lot of arguments about humans doing the same thing, but the reality is that humans and robots don't enjoy the same legal protection. Its clearly a derivative work of all of its training data

> Honestly? Yes.

Then it works both ways. Say I manage to generate essentially a ripoff of your copyrighted song, release it and make a ton of money, you now have to split that royalty with keyboard cat. And Joe bloggs. You'd end up fractions of pennies

> if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine

That's pretty much what happened, isn't it? These concerns were all discussed in the beginning back in 2022, and I recall answers from many here on HN along the lines of "oh well, we can't stop it now or we'll risk falling behind China in AI development"

So yeah, the laws went out the window a long time ago the moment our government and the people decided to just look the other way willingly in the name of "progress."

> the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine

Ever since the early 2010s when companies were started with the business idea "unlicensed hotels" and "unlicensed taxis" and made the owners really, really rich, this is said pretty much out loud. Look for words like "regulatory risks" and similar.

Maybe it started with the unlicensed gambling fad before that? That also made a lot of people filthy rich. Every time you have something under special license, or insuance requirements, then of course there is a margin for you if you can skimp on the license and hire gig workers instead.

The LLM situation with copyright and derived works in the 2020s is similar. Someone is likely to be rich, but there is a clear regulatory risk to it.

> If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation.

That is the difference between necessary and sufficient. Clean-room is sufficient to guarantee avoiding copyright, but it is not necessary. The line legally is south of there, but that position was chosen because they didn’t want to crossing and it was easier to argue for legally in court.

tl;dr: clean room is overkill for avoiding copyright infringement

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